1K Competition: Seagate ships billionth drive, and we've got one for you

1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?
Thanks to Seagate Technologies, which just shipped its billionth drive, one of you will get enough space to store your work a billion times over: a Terabyte hard drive.
If every drive it ever sold was put together, Seagate says, there'd be enough space to store 79 million terabytes (75 exabytes). It took three decades to do so, but thinks it will double that number in less than 5 years.
Making the most of limited space is the theme of the competition, however. It’s no good giving us 1k of actionscript glued to assets that mock the metric. If you write us a short story, 1,000 letters will trump 1,000 words.
On the other hand, if your 1K of source code ends up as a 3MB executable thanks to unavoidable embedded runtimes, worry not. So long as your rationale is clear, we won’t be sticklers.
The one rule is that whatever you do should be under a license that permits us to use your work at BBG without issue. GPL or Creative Commons licenses are suggested. (This is in lieu of the traditional option, where you submit this sort of stuff to a contest and then lose all rights to it.)
Link to your entry from the comments (or even just post it there!) and fire off an email to beschizza#gmail.com. We'll cycle back in a week and start picking the winners.
(P.S. The Seagate logo up top? Too big. It's 1,025 bytes!)
Update: Gabriel McGovern reminds that you can slim down PNGs very easily. Note that we're OK with using zip files or other "containers" to crunch something down, but will be more impressed by those who use cleverer compression methods like McGovern's

It is a two minute procedural animation with music. The visuals are made using a pixelshader 3.0 shader and the music is just some midi notes. Everything squeezed into this self-contained executable using my own cruncher

“Today on the NewYou.com hour our guest is scientist, author – and until a recent press release, recluse – Doctor Joeseph Veriton. Thank you for coming on our show.”

“I’m delighted to be here, thank you for having me.”

“Doctor Veriton, how did you manage to encode an entire human genome into a single kilobyte?”

“The short answer is compression. The long answer is I didn’t; the DNA did.”

“Could you describe for us the theory behind it?”

“Sure. DNA has four ingredients, and those ingredients are mapped in a series in order to create the infamous double helix. What happens is: incredibly complex patterns begin to emerge, so complex that we can’t see them — but protein-based computers can, because they contain many if not all the same patterns, but in a different order. We don’t encode the genome, we encode the patterns. The protein can ‘unzip’ the pattern, using itself as a sort of template.”

The old adage says “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” Since the average word length in English is 5.1 letters (http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/), that means a 1024-byte picture is worth approximately 200 words. So show me a 1024-byte image that conveys as much information as 200 well-chosen words.

Frink was breathless: “It happened while I was testing a batch of the new Giant MagnetoResistive tech; I’d initialised the platter with zeroes and then read it back to verify. The qual script flagged it as a write failure, but with an incredibly high failure perce-”

Johnson interrupted: “Cut to the chase, man – you’re saying the run was contaminated.”

Followup: Turns out that my applet is less responsive on Linux than on Windows. It does improve after you’ve played with it a bit (delayed JIT optimization?), but even so I have to admit it isn’t as pretty. May be tweakable; may be an artifact of the differences between PM and X. Investigating.

It’s a simple Java “mandala painting” applet, whose source code has been hammered down to 978 bytes. I still hope to get the executable below the 1K mark too, but I don’t think I’m going to achieve that before the deadline. Conversely, there are features which I’d like to add to make this even more addictive… but they’d push me over the 1K mark so I can’t include them in this version.

I’ve done transfinite amounts of Java coding, but unlike most folks I’ve been using it as a traditional programming language rather than doing GUI stuff — most of my Java code has been back-end utilities. I think this is the first applet I’ve written in the past decade. Thanks for the excuse to play!

As of now, there is no explanation (there are some hints, though), so you can try your hand at determining what it is if you want a challenge. I will build a nice explanation page shortly (before the week expires, of course) and put it up for you to see.